OMOD: An open-source tool for creating disaggregated mobility demand based on OpenStreetMap

Abstract

This paper introduces OMOD (OpenStreetMap Mobility Demand Generator), a new open-source activity-based mobility demand generation tool. OMOD uses a data-driven approach, calibrated with household travel survey data, to generate a population of agents with detailed daily activity schedules that state what activities each agent plans to conduct, where, and for how long. The temporal aspect of the output is wholly disaggregated, while the spatial aspect is given on the level of individual buildings. In contrast to other existing models, OMOD is freely available, open-source, works out-of-the-box, can be applied to anywhere in Germany with the ambition to widen the scope to other countries, and only requires freely available OpenStreetMap (OSM) data from the user. With OMOD, it is easy for non-experts to create realistic mobility demand, which can be used in transportation studies, energy system modeling, communications system research, et cetera. This paper describes OMOD’s architecture and validates the model for three cities ranging from 200,000 to 2.5 million inhabitants.